Parents Have Become Project Managers in the Time of COVID-19

Parents of younger children, I'm about to tell you why you're feeling so tired and overwhelmed right now... even if your student is only doing whatever it is the school has assigned... even if your school has been amazing about setting up a distance learning system. It is because you are now a project manager in addition to whatever else it is you have to do each day. Let's look at what project managers do:

- Help define project scope, goals, and deliverables
- Activity and resource planning
- Create schedules and project timelines
- Organize and motivate the project team
- Oversee time management
- Manage expectations
- Direct and support the team
- Ensure customer (teacher) satisfaction
- Analyze and managing project feasibility
- Monitor progress
- Track and review deliverables
- Implement and manage change when necessary

This is no small feat when you have multiple teachers with all kinds of different expectations for students who have never had to self-manage their education before. Maybe you have multiple children in different grades, too. At the same time, you're probably also doing household IT because there's SeeSaw and Pagelet and Google Classroom and Google Meet and Zoom and ST Math and Happy Numbers and choice boards and on and on.

Maybe you're doing all this while sharing a device with your kids and you're waking up at 4 a.m. to work... and then working until midnight because they're using your laptop for multiple Zoom meetings and Scholastic Reads assignments. Maybe your kids are sharing one device and it's up to you to figure out how they can both keep up with the growing number of assignments.

Maybe you're doing this while also struggling with depression or chronic pain or a disability that makes juggling all of it a thousand times more challenging. Maybe you're not working and so you have time, but what you don't have is the mental energy to stay on top of multiple learning platforms and a multitude of assignments because you're focused on surviving.

Maybe it all felt doable until the district decided it was going to seriously start tracking student progress - and not just academics, but also the arts and gym and somehow they've started assigning "Fun!", too. There are people who claim this isn't a burden on parents because teachers are doing all of the heavy lifting by creating all of these assignments. But project management is a job, too - one that many of us are doing on top of the jobs we are lucky to still have.

So if you're exhausted, if you feel like you can't do this for one more day, if you want to quit and run away, I get it. I see you doing your best, and I know you're going to get through it. So will I, but it's fine to acknowledge that, no, this is not as easy as sitting kids down in front of a computer.